News

Meet our new post-doc Mandy de Wilde

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February 7, 2016

Mandy de Wilde started as a postdoctoral researcher at the Environmental Policy Group in January 2016. The coming two years Mandy will work in the field of energy retrofitting. More specific, she will work on a research project that focuses on the domestic energy retrofit practices of homeowners in the Netherlands.

She will evaluate innovative strategies which are designed by social enterprises with the aim to activate homeowners to engage in domestic energy retrofitting. The project collaborates with social enterprises KUUB, Hoom BV and Buurkracht, and with the organization HIER Klimaatbureau.

Mandy is trained as a sociologist at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) but very much values, just like the ENP-group, an interdisciplinary outlook. In 2015 she completed her PhD at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) in the Netherlands. Her dissertation entitled Brave new neighbourhood. Affective citizenship in Dutch territorial governance was an ethnography on the emotionalization and depoliticization of active citizenship in Dutch urban governance. In her dissertation she unraveled the performativity of the rather elusive, vague concept of ‘citizenship’ by analyzing how ‘citizens’ are enacted in all kinds of (policy) practices. As part of her PhD she was a visiting fellow at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She has published on urban governance, neighbourhood regeneration, affective citizenship, community participation, the politics of home, gender issues and evaluation practices, among others in Urban Studies and through a Dutch edited volume (with Evelien Tonkens) called Als meedoen pijn doet. Affectief burgerschap in de wijk (2013).

During and after her PhD she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Inequalities, Poverty, Social Exclusion and the City (OASeS) at the University of Antwerp in Belgium where she contributed to a research project on the dynamics of solidarity, place-making and community formation in superdiverse, urban environments.

In addition to her passion for cities and urbanism, she also started to develop a concern and passion for environmental issues during her PhD. This led her to pursue various small projects on the matter - from teaching students about urban sustainability issues and starting a research project on urban gardening and local food production in Amsterdam. She is now looking forward to immerse herself fulltime in the expertise, experience and research projects of the Environmental Policy Group and hopes to make a contribution to the growing awareness, reflection and discussion on environmental issues and their solutions.